Sylvia Plath, the poet synonymous with a young woman’s tortured soul, and who committed suicide at the age of 30,
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Massachusetts, 1959. Photograph: Alamy
is coming to the auction block.
Copies of her novel, The Bell Jar, complete with her firm, clear handwriting, are among the many items to be available.
The books are part of a collection of Plath’s possessions, including clothes, jewellery, furniture, books with loving inscriptions from Hughes, her heavily annotated cookery book, and the Hermes typewriter on which she wrote The Bell Jar, now being sold by her only surviving child, Frieda Hughes.
Pet Tom Hughes and Plath were a dazzling couple, married within months of meeting at a student party in Cambridge in 1956 – a date commemorated in many of the inscriptions. The sale at Bonhams auctioneers in March will include her sketch of Hughes made on their Spanish honeymoon, looking as she described him like a “big unruly Huckleberry Finn”. It is estimated to fetch up to $50,000.
The most heavily used book, spine splitting, pages stained, heavily underlined and with marks of spilled gravy, is Plath’s “Joy of Cooking”, given to her by her mother and kept all her life. Against a recipe for breaded slices of veal rubbed with garlic, and baked in cream, Plath put a little star, and the note “Ted likes this”.
“Some of it is hard to read, knowing what happened,” Batterham said. “You would have said this was a very happy and enduring relationship, with both of them giving the highest respect and support to each other’s work.”
The collection will be sold in the books and manuscripts auction at Bonhams in London on 21 March 2018.